On Sunday it got as German as it can get in Michigan - we visited Frankenmuth. That’s a small town about an hour and a half north of Royal Oak that was founded by German settlers in 1845. The whole town is basically a simulation of Bavaria including the architecture and the traditions they maintain.

One thing there that’s not too German is Bronner’s - The worlds largest Christmas store.

That was our first stop and the size of the store was truly amazing. Even though I wouldn’t like to have even one of their items in my apartment it was very interesting to browse through (parts of) their selection. Below here you can see about half of section 8.

What surprised me was that you can buy Christmas balls for special occasions and apparently give them to others as presents. Here for example is the section with the motto “congratulations that you managed to make a baby, oh, and it’s Christmas”. Of course that’s only half of the section for the specific case that the baby is female.

The store is also on StreetView in case you’re interested:

Of course the store also had a section with German items which mostly were cups, mugs and glasses. How fast can you empty Schloss Neuschwanstein?

While we where browsing through the mugs and glasses my German origin was doubted because my answer to “do you have mugs like these at home?”, “but you have some of these glass boots?” and “do you at least know somebody who has something like this?” was ‘no’ each time.

Then we changed the location and finally had the famous German chicken I heard so much about. Zehnder’s is a nice and pretty large restaurant that serves before mentioned fried chicken with all you can eat mashed potatoes, stuffing, chicken soup and green beans. Even though the chicken wasn’t German at all, the fixings were pretty accurate and everything tasted very good.

Last stop was the Frankenmuth Brewery where we stood in Das Bier Line to get Das Bier. They have a dachshund as their mascot that is posing for their Hefeweizen “The Hef” as Hugh Hefner.

All in all this was a very relaxing and fun Sunday. I’d like to come back at least once in the summer to walk around and see the rest of the town.